Things which are not helpful

Today, I've spent a lot of time banging my head against the brick wall of bad or mad search design.

First up was the Scottish Government, with its contribution to "thwarting any attempt at a search", by somehow managing to date various items as being released on October, November and December...of this year. So looking for recent items was impressively pointless. As was the fact that the search was also giving over 300k results.

Looking forward to that Forced Marriage report in December.

Then, I went into the Scottish Parliament website, to try doing a search in the Official Report. Top tip: don't do this. Ever. Use Google to search the Parliament's website instead.

Mainly because, if you can get the report to return hits, then you get to wade through the results, blindly. And blindly it is, because the search doesn't give you any idea of how many pages of results you've got, or any shortcut to get to specific points/leapfrog to a further point. So if you know when something happened, and just want to get to that point in time, you need to click...and click....and click...hoping to get to where you know you want to be, but not knowing how long it will take, to move through the unknown number of pages....

So yeah: just Google it. It's less stressful, I can assure you.

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Reinventing the wheel

I noticed an advert on the TV during the summer, and while watching it, I found myself becoming increasingly more irritated by its content as it went on. Then, not long after that, I saw another advert along the same lines, for the same group. I was reminded of my reaction to viewing those adverts last weekend, when I attended Library Camp Glasgow. One of the sessions I took part in covered advocacy, and what can we do to better promote the profession. The existence of these adverts is evidence of, to me, why we need to continue to work hard to show the wider public that "librarian" does not (and never has) equal "timid person who stamps books and says shhhh a lot".

So, this is one of the adverts that so annoyed me, for Barclays Digital Eagles:

Now, I'm not disputing the fact that the concept is great: Barclays are funding people specifically to assist those who don't have the skills needed to make full use of the internet, and the many opportunities it off…

Moving house

I've got a new home, over at Wordpress. Find me there in future, at dumplinginahanky.com.

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Relaunching a library service

What do you do when you decide to do what is verging on library-based insanity, and basically scrap your current library service, and relaunch everything - physical layout, LMS, and classification system? In my case, spend a year, planning, developing, preparing….and then a frantic few weeks hauling stock!
The background to this apparent madness is this: when I took on this role I inherited a library using a layout that didn’t seem to make sense, a classification system I wasn’t familiar with, and an LMS that had been in place for 20 years but didn’t seem suited to our needs. As I was new to the library, a major part of the time I had available while settling in during my initial few months was dedicated to exploring how well these things were working, both for users, and library staff. I had the benefit of my colleague also being new to the library, only a few months after me, so together we looked at these issues with fresh eyes.We came to the following conclusions: The physical layou…

Dumpling in a Hanky

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